MetalBite Review by Chris on 8/6/2001
If playing in Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal wasn’t enough, Erik Rutan started his own recording studio (Dimensional Sound Studios), became a producer and decided to start a next project called Alas. When do you sleep, man??? Actually... I think that because of lack of sleep we have the weirdest, most unique dark and atmospheric record that’s out there.

No wonder Erik himself called this album “the most deepest and difficult record yet”. Morbid Angel or Hate Eternal are the melodic, easy listening bands compared to Alas and “Absolute Purity” is nothing you might expect from it. If because of Erik’s correlation with Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal you think you’d get some quality death metal, forget about it. Or if you remember Martina Astner’s voice from Therion and you were awaiting beautiful harmonic melodies, forget about that too.

This is the most ‘disharmonic’ piece of music I’ve heard to date. There are parts, actually a lot of them, where Martina is singing however she wants without even listening to Erik’s guitar and vice versa. Sounds interesting? Hell yeah, first time I played this CD in my player I thought I got a bad copy with unfinished arrangements but amazingly it all started to make sense with every spin. This man is simply incapable of writing a bad music. Complex and technical riffs combined with Martina’s musically un-adhesive, but still sweet voice, may sound abnormal to many fans but everyone into the dark side of metal will love it.

And one more thing, “Absolute Purity” is not something you just start playing while you go do something else, you have to really concentrate while listening to this album. Even better, put on the headphones and let them take you to your deepest and darkest parts of your mind. You won’t regret it.

Bottom Line: Can you imagine that with all those aberrant and unmatching music layers I remember those melodies and I even caught myself singing one? Weird.